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Saturday, December 30, 2006

Tom Braidwood on Loki's Sydney Hobart race

We are not sure what Designer Jim Pugh would have thought, but the unwanted water ballast on the first afternoon onboard Loki was surely not part of her design and of course didn't seem to help her progress.Loki was forced to remove hatches in the bow in order to repair the hydraulics that operate the essential jib car system. Once these hatches are opened, it allows ocean water to flood into the bow compartment. Tom Braidwood continues, 'the boats bow was just full with of over a tonne of water, it took us all afternoon to do the repair and then remove the water, then to finally get moving again. The bilge pump could not handle the amount of water that needed to be removed so we were forced to resort to the old fashion method of a bunch of us guys forming a good old bucket brigade. Understandably, having the bow full of water made the trim of the boat terrible and hence we lost any advantage we had over Yendys very early on.''We spent lots of the race with both Yendys and Wot Yot in sight, it was so very easy to see how our overall speed was over the course.